The Politico has published what may be the longest piece in the publication’s hallowed history. Predictably, it’s an extended whine about how Obama treats the press. Most whine off the record, but Iraq war cheerleader George Packer, at least, doesn’t:

“I don’t think they need to be nice to reporters, but the White House seems to imagine that releasing information is like a tap that can be turned on and off at their whim.”

Well, they don’t have to be nice to reporters. And releasing information is like a tap.

I sympathize with reporters on this, but it’s simple: the George W. Bush administration made you their bitch. Now you’re every administration’s bitch.

Um…isn’t that basically a clear admission that they’re just stenographers? If the press was doing their job, this wouldn’t be an issue. How about we get some people to actually, I don’t know, do some real journalism and discover things for themselves rather than wait for it to be spoon fed.

my gripe about the WH press corps, is that they were a bunch of supine simps for the balance of the Bush/Cheney regime, and that they would only discover their spine once a Democrat took office and overcompensate by returning to the Clinton era rules, where they would function as a megaphone for whatever bullshit faux scandal the right-wing noise machine could gin up.

How about you stop giving equal treatment to idiots like Orly Taitz? How about you do some “investigation”(gasp!)?

Someone tell me the last BIG story the MSM media has broken. I mean Watergate style big. It’s been awhile because they are empty suits, just as empty as the politicians they latch onto like lampreys. I have one ounce of sympathy, and that was wasted making myself a bloody mary to try and drown out the whiny BS.

The reason they’re upset is because Democrats are supposed to bend over backwards & jump through hoops to be nice to them. Republicans, manly men all, can & do behave like total jerks & that’s totally acceptable.

Yes, I agree with most of you: journalism these days is certainly not experiencing anything like its finest hour. But it’s also a huge problem that there is one set of rules for Democrats and another set of rules for Republicans.

Look at it this way: if a Democratic president had authorized torture and lied his way into a war of choice, what do you think the press would have had to say about it?

“The White House wants their friend to be in the pool and we don’t know what recourse we have,” [Washington Examiner’s Julie] Mason later told POLITICO. “It’s just completely unfair to the press corps and flies in the face of the concept of a free press.”

The reason they’re upset is because Democrats are supposed to bend over backwards & jump through hoops to be nice to them. Republicans, manly men all, can & do behave like total jerks & that’s totally acceptable.

In a nutshell.

In another nutshell: Politico is finding things to criticize now that a Democrat is President.

OMG … I actually read this. The stupid hurt so bad. One of the reporters had the gall to say that no president had treat the press so badly for 10 years. So I guess Democratic presidents are just mean. Is that the moral?

What the article doesn’t talk about is the fact that many of them are writing books about Obama and/or his administration and want greater face time and access so that they can get unique tidbits for their books so they can make a ton of money. They’re also looking for face time on tv, those politico guys appear on lots of shows. Look at Chuck Todd, he appears on various shows on MSNBC on a daily basis plus he has his own show.So very easily opinion and facts become conflated and the news becomes a he-said she-said story, instead of just plain facts.

“They ain’t seen nothing yet,” the longtime ABC reporter said. “Wait ‘till they have to start really circling the wagons when someone in the administration under attack, wait ‘till there’s a scandal, wait ‘till someone screws up, then it’ll get hostile.”

Everyone knows that the Republicans have a good chance of taking back the house and Issa just got a Bush mole at SEC to push this Goldman controversy investigation. Imagine if he had subpoena power? And imagine if the press decided to play up his part of the story and ignore the WH? Imagine if Obama got the Clinton treatment?

That’s what they’re threatening and that’s what this was all about; that the Democrats won’t have total control come January and the White House has no good will to bank for the Republican shit storm to come.

These assholes have a list: notice the political appointees that won’t talk. They don’t give names; but they’re there and if a scandal erupts won’t that be sad.

These people aren’t fools. They totally abdicated their responsibility to inform the public during the health care debate; that’s why the president is so contemptuous of them.

I am still really bothered by how personal they make this. Part of the problem was that the Bush White House played them very adroitly and personally and individually. We all saw it. The Bush Team stroked them, and drew them in based on an astute and cynical read of each media personality’s ambitions. It was very much a team effort, the relationship between Bush and the press, it excluded the public, and it was really wrong.
I find it so hard to hear them bitch about “access”. We saw how easily they were played by “access”. They were broadcasting whatever Cheney planted. What’s the public benefit to access if it comes with a complete suspension of ethics and critical thinking? They’re going to have to earn credibility. The Bush Years damaged that, and they haven’t addressed it.

The WH press corpse doesn’t do anything a trained parrot couldn’t do [squaaak! some people say! some people say! Drudge bait! squaaak!]. Hey, but look at that plumage – beautiful bird, the Norwegian Blue.

No wonder the media promotes the Teabaggers so much. They have the same modus operandi: Ignore Republican bad behavior, project said bad behavior on Democrats, and RAAAAAAAAAAAAAGE over perceived injustices perpetrated against them by the phantom Liberal Tyranny.

Cooper was matter of fact when asked about her run-ins with the White House. “We cover the White House. Sometimes they like what we do. Sometimes they don’t. That’s just the way it is,” she said, declining to elaborate.

That, to me, is professional. Notice the “we”, and the lack of any reference to her personally.

Now they’ve got an additional credibility problem, because they’ve all but announced they’re pissed off and they’re embarking on a vendetta. Was that smart? Not in terms of Obama, but in terms of their public credibility?

“We in the press dislike Obama, and here is our ‘bill of particulars'”. Great. Way to discredit your own work.

The press are whiny, for sure. But, it does seem from all accounts that Obama really does not like the press mainly due to the concentration on frivolity, the failure to report the truth and the obsession with who’s up and who’s down. That, by the way, has nothing to do with a free press and everything to do with Obama wanting the best for his country. It only makes me like him more as he’s demonstrating that he’s by far the most serious politician in the world today.

Wait a minute. When the President actually held press conferences, during which they asked off topic questions like about the Gates affair, they complained he was eating up network time.

See the thing that really gets their goat is, a WH house press conference is supposed to be like the movie The Untouchables in which each reporter can get in touch with his inner Eliot Ness (the poor guy from Fox who pulled the short straw has to be the Sean Connery-esque supporting character, cruelly gunned down by goons and crawling across the floor to the sound of opera music as his life bleeds away).

But noooooo, the WH has to go and ruin it all by having Obama stand on the wrong side of the podium. That is supposed to be them up there in front of all the cameras, basking in the bright lights, while Obama tosses them answers carefully chosen to show how sharp and insightfull and full of intrepidnessidity they are. After all, that’s how Woodward and Bernstein did it. It’s so unfaiiiiirrrrrr!

Remember what they did to Gore? They essentially took him down. He sighed, he “invented the internet”, no one liked him. Except all those people who voted for him, despite the high school lunch room clique smear job.

My problem is everyone should be pissed about the health care coverage. It sucked.

Everyone is pissed about it. At least everyone who cares about reality is pissed about it. So, rather than owning up to their mistakes and recognizing their own failures, a lot of these people are compounding them by lashing out and blaming others. It’s a spiral of suckitude, which looks like it’s not going to reverse course anytime soon.

“The White House wants their friend to be in the pool and we don’t know what recourse we have,” [Washington Examiner’s Julie] Mason later told POLITICO. “It’s just completely unfair to the press corps and flies in the face of the concept of a free press.”

The convienient thing Politico leaves out is how individual Press Secretaries deal with the press. The WH Press weenies universally found Tony Snow to be the worst of the lot because he wasn’t accessible, didn’t answer basic requests, etc. They loved Dana whatshername because she was accessible. But hey, we here at Politico don’t want to put any actual context onto this story, we have a meme to push and this is it.

Despite who Julie Mason works for, her reporting in the pages of the Examiner is pretty straight forward reporting that certainly doesn’t have the wingnuttery the editorial page has. Back when when she worked for the Houston Chronicle, her online “blog” was more snarky than anything else.

There were exceptions. I was just flabbergasted by the reaction of media when all those polls came out, where no one understood health care. The whole theme was “Obama didn’t sell this effectively”. The theme of today’s Politico rant is “Obama controls the message, and limits access”.
That’s what happens when he’s charged with “sales” and they won’t report any objective facts, or refute anything. It’s all “sales”. Do they blame him?
The funniest part of the whole thing to me is that health care could be an absolute abomination. There COULD BE death panels in there. No one would know. No one who raised it would have any credibility anyway, if it were TRUE.
I could stick anything into legislation. Republicans are sure to chase something shiny, and the press are sure to follow them.

@NobodySpecial: Really? Someone from the Washington Examiner made that statement? What a joke. A ridiculously rightwing rag whining that the Democratic President isn’t nice to them. Maybe Michelle Malkin should give that lady a lesson in the virtues of taking personal responsibility for one’s attitudes and behaviors.

I guess those “Republicans blocking efforts to regulate those assholes you saw on TV yesterday” headlines today made a few GOPers nervous. As opposed to this, which strikes me as pure elephant dung:

McConnell contrasted the skirmish over financial reform with previous legislative fights over the stimulus and health care bills. “This time,” he said, “people have actually had a chance to look at one of these massive Democrat bills for a change, and what’s perfectly clear to most of them is that this bill needs some work, which is precisely what Republicans have been saying for the last two weeks.”

“Massive Democrat”? Hey now, did you ever see Henry Hyde? I mean, be fair.

“The White House wants their friend to be in the pool and we don’t know what recourse we have,” [Washington Examiner’s Julie] Mason later told POLITICO. “It’s just completely unfair to the press corps and flies in the face of the concept of a free press.”

-Try doing your job, you stupid bitch.
The White House knows you’re not their friend.

poor dears. maybe a nice long long lie-down far far away from those bright lights might be best for them. we know how they get if they’re over-tired. if they won’t go quietly for their nap, feel free to use the manacles and chains to keep them there. (their teddy has a matching set of manacles and their binky is in the upper left cupboard on the left.)

@DougJ: Is their basic complaint that they are being shut out or that they are not being treated seriously? I refuse to give Politico the click to find out, but the tone of the bits quoted in the main post and the comments suggests to me that the press corps is feeling more dissed than ignored.

Obama and the media actually have a surprisingly hostile relationship — as contentious on a day-to-day basis as any between press and president in the past decade, reporters who cover the White House say.

Translation: WH Press admits it was friends with Bush, and gave him less contentious coverage.

@Nick: And remember when he held press conferences and reporters complained about how boring it all was?

I’m not reading the link, but I honestly don’t know what the media wants. There are various initiatives being pushed, and it’s all above board. There don’t seem to any brewing scandals that demand administration stonewalling, etc. I really don’t see what the issue is. What substantive questions is Obama dodging? Anything like, “Why did you really get us into a war? Are we really torturing people? Who did you meet with before writing the energy bill? Did you really gather information from phone records of millions of Americans?”

Which reminds me, the New York Times fucking sat on the telecom story until after the Bush/Kerry election. So fuck them all in the ear.

And, yes, I know Obama is doing the same thing Bush did re: the police state, but it doesn’t seem like he’s pretending he’s not, and as he’s continuing policies, not initiating them, it’s not such a big news story (unless, of course, the Republicans want it to be).

Fitting that the moderator started the whole shebang off with the crap of ‘Obama is under 50 constantly, is the country missing Bush? Is Obama really just doing Bush’s dirty work? Or maybe the country really needs another Bush back!’

@James K. Polk, Esq.: It’s true. The funny thing is that I wish I could sympathize. It would be better for me if I thought the press was on my side and that I could be on theirs. But that’s not the reality, so let’s not pretend it is.

What it comes down to is this: If you want to be nothing more than a gossipy asshole, then be a gossipy asshole. And be proud of it. But you can’t be a gossipy asshole and then wonder why people don’t want to be your friend. Nobody wants a gossipy asshole for a friend. Except for other gossipy assholes, that is. Hence the reason that the press and the GOP get along so very well.

The White House press corps sounds like a prison inmate who’s just been traded to another gangleader for a pack of smokes, and now whines about the insultingly low quality of the cigarettes for which they got sold.

@Kryptik: That introduction to the comments threw me. It was so unrelated, I thought maybe I had gone to the wrong page. I eventually decided it was just a web hiccup — wrong comment put in the wrong thread. It didn’t occur to me that it was written and put there on purpose. But I’m not a regular Politico reader…

After 8 years of carrying water on issues from WMDs, Libby, Wiretapping, torture, millions of lost email, corruption, etc. I think the WH Press Corp should simply be happy that the public is too misinformed to have them drawn and quartered like they deserve.

Maybe this White House treats them like crap because they don’t trust them. And you know what?! They’re right not to.

These people all act like they’re writing for the political version of US Weekly. Its all gossip, horseraces, he said/she said BS.

DO YOUR EFFING JOB and maybe you’ll be treated better.

No one cares that the social secretary didn’t put the “right” people on the guest list for some fancy dinner! We care about whether we went to war on a lie, or what will happen to the millions without health insurance. Government is up to its eyeballs in decisions that literally cause people to live or die and none of these people seem to be able to think past the cocktail parties.

Considering the majority of comments that Politico gets on their site (from the non-professionals and sorts like in the Arena here), it seems to fit perfectly in. Long as you recognize that Politico is about as bi-partisan as Olympia Snowe.

It’s interesting inside baseball stuff if you’re in the journalism or PR business, but for everyone else, it comes off as introspective, navel-gazing whining to spend so much ink complaining about how Gibbs & Co. are mean to you. I suspect there are at least 100,000 unemployed reporters who would be more than happy to swap places (and paychecks) with anyone in the White House press room if the price was that Rahm would scream at them once in awhile.

Perhaps a prominent member of the WH press corps should’ve bought Obama some doughnuts during the ’08 campaign. We could’ve avoided all of this unpleasantness right there.

Well, I’m not going to Politico to read that link, but from what folks here are saying it sounds like reporters talking about themselves again. I wish they could figure out that they are supposed to cover the story, not be the story, but you know what they say about wishes and beggars and horses…